Obsolete equipment

I'm updating this blog on my 5 year old iMac, which works like a charm even after being loved to death. This is my fourth Macintosh computer in 23 years. I average between 5 and 6 years per Mac, starting with the first Mac that I bought in December of 1984. I replaced that with a Mac Plus in around 1990, then a Performa (who even remembers them?) in 1996, and then my iMac in 2002.

Sure wish I could say the same for the Dell laptops that my university provides me with for my classes and research. They are outdated in just 3 years.

Ahh, love the new technology. Now if I could just get my 5 year old Palm Pilot to work.....

Excel 2007

I spent six hours today in a class to learn Excel 2007-a class that assumed I already knew Excel 2003 (which I do). Six hours! And we didn't get through all of the material.

Is this what people all over the United States will be doing, spending hours learning how to do something in a new tool that they could do (some of them expertly) in an old tool? This just reinforces my belief that technology just creates more "stuff" for us to do (backup disks, refrag drives, rewrite papers until they are perfect because we couldn't possibly have an error in them) or not (when was the last time I backed up my own drive I wonder?)

Well we may be the most productive people in the world but I'm sure it comes at a cost. We spend much too much time dealing with our "tools" and not enough time getting real work done. But then, that's just my opinion.